What is the best book that attempts to refute or critique libertarianism? By "best", I mean most thoughful. I am looking specifically for a critique that actually understands libertarianism instead of simply confusing it with straw men and conservatism. In other words, which books would you recommend to someone to convince them that libertarianism is false?
"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it." -Milton Friedman
"It is a mistake to think businessmen are more immoral than politicians." -John Maynard Keynes
Uh...
if I were trying to do that, I'd try Bentham. But obviously I think Bentham was wrong or I wouldn't be a libertarian. Or at least, I'd be a consequentialist.
Pro Christo et Libertate integre!
MacFall: Uh... if I were trying to do that, I'd try Bentham. But obviously I think Bentham was wrong or I wouldn't be a libertarian. Or at least, I'd be a consequentialist.
Someone who supported the end of slavery, the decriminalization of usury, and free trade is the best critic of libertarianism you could think of? Which work of his do you think has plausible arguments against libertarianism? I am familiar with his "nonsence on stilts" quote, but don't know his real arguments against natural rights. Are there any more modern works that attack libertarianism that actually understand it?
I think the best place to attack libertarianism is through property theory; you might take a look at G.A. Cohen's book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, as well as Becky Mansfield's essay, "Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations," and Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons." I think libertarianism can be reconciled with these objections, but the "natural rights" varieties might not survive, and in my experience most libertarians are of the natural rights variety. (To be clear, I'm not hostile to the idea that people have natural rights; I just don't think that any such rights lead to libertarian conceptions of property).
The reason I'd focus on this avenue of attack is that without legitimate property claims, the system to which many (but not all) libertarians are tied crumbles.
http://libertarian-left.blogspot.com/
If anyone takes the time to bother with Cohen, I'd recommend they also read Eric Mack's scathing criticism of his criticism of libertarianism, and maybe even Tom Palmer's.
-Jon
I cannot be caged. I cannot be controlled. Understand this as you die, ever pathetic, ever fools.
Irenicus' Diaries.
Thanks for the responses. I'll check them out. BTW I'm attempting to compile a short list of the most common objections to libertarianism that don't rely on strawmen or misunderstandings. Any more advice?
Well it eventually depends on what you mean by "libertarianism", since different objections will address different ways of arriving at libertarian conclusions. But here are some pretty decent objections which have relatively broad application:
1) There is no logical connection between using something and having an exclusive right to use or trade it which persists indefinitely. Further, the fact that private appropriation often (if not usually) results in dispossession and inequality gives us some reason to question whether it is really fair in the first place. Accordingly, the idea that a system of privately owned property is somehow "natural" or "the only reasonable arrangement" is baseless. Without this mode of social organization, the libertarian vision crumbles. It basically amounts to a "well if we assume a world where property titles are legitimately held, then we can say..." kind of argument, which can hardly be persuasive if we don't believe that private appropriation can be morally legitimate.
2) Libertarians acknowledge that we would be justified in using force against those who violate the rights of others, and also presumably believe that individuals should not be subject to the arbitrary judgments of individuals who want to take justice into their own hands, enforcing whatever they personally take to be the proper sentence for a crime. But contrary to Rothbard's claim, there is no objective standard of procedural justice which we can appeal to in order to determine whether a sentence is fair or not. Accordingly, libertarianism either collapses into some sort of pacifism ("Individuals are never justified in using force against others, even if they believe a rights violation to have taken place"), subjectivism ("Individuals are justified in using whatever force they personally deem to be necessary in enforcing rights, as long as they make an honest attempt to adhere to their own principles of justice"), or some kind of voluntarism ("People would want there to be a standard, so they could voluntarily enter into groups which enforced uniform standards upon their members"), or some combination of those three. If this is the case, though, libertarianism can amount to nothing more than skepticism. Libertarians can't say anything about justice except what they would want people to do, or what they would do about people who did wrongly in their eyes, or what they would want their own societies to implement as general rules. But then I could just as easily come up with something completely different. So all this talk about how things should be, or how rights are supposed to work, is nonsense. What libertarians are really talking about is what they would want the world to be like if they got to make the rules. But given their emphasis on letting people do what they want, that's kind of a ridiculous sort of conversation for a libertarian to want to engage in!
3) Libertarians talk about rights as if they're sacred or something, but let's be realistic: rights are shorthand ways of talking about mistreatment. If I don't mistreat you, then it seems like it would be ridiculous to say that I violated your rights. But I don't think that it is mistreating a person to use force against them in certain kinds of situations. For example, let's imagine a child is drowning in the middle of a lake, and you and I are standing right nearby. If you have a canoe, but refuse to use it to help the child because you don't care if he lives or dies, I think I would be perfectly justified to take your canoe in order to save the boy (I'd give it back afterwards, sure). Even if you were in the canoe at the time, and I had to push you out in order to save the kid's life, I would think myself justified. And if, for whatever reason, I were unable to use the canoe myself, but I had a gun, I wouldn't feel particularly immoral if I threatened you with severe bodily harm if you didn't save the kid. So no, I don't think rights are absolute; they're just prima facie considerations about what's generally not okay to do to people. And if everything I've said before is right, then it seems like we could probably justify the use of coercion for a lot of purposes that are generally opposed by libertarians, particularly aid for the poor.
4) Libertarians talk about freedom as if it's valuable in itself, but if we knew that completely free people would likely lead significantly worse lives, it wouldn't make much sense to advocate freedom. And as far as I can tell, we do know of certain patterns where people repeatedly make bad decisions and regret them later (just look at the prison system). We also know about certain choices that are generally not in the interest of those who make them, and we can predict with reasonable certainty that they will be bad for those who choose them in the future (think of the choice to use heroin). If we know about these patterns, it seems weird to say that we shouldn't at least consider the possibility of using force to deal with them. Perhaps we would decide in the end that we couldn't properly solve the problems with coercion, but the libertarian idea that it's somehow "immoral" to even think about it just seems baseless. Why would it be wrong to force someone to avoid making a bad choice if we had every reason to believe that they would regret the choice if we let them make it?
5) What about the poor/children/roads?
6) Libertarians generally ignore environmental ethics completely, and this is unacceptable. They typically rely on an anthropocentric worldview that is completely counterintuitive and accepted by almost no one except libertarians, and they have no widely accepted way of taking non-human interests into account when discussing justice. Further, it's unclear exactly how most libertarians could solve this problem without completely restructuring their paradigm. If libertarianism commits us to unreasonable views about environmental ethics, that would serve as pretty good evidence that perhaps it is fundamentally mistaken.
Now I don't exactly hold any of the views discussed above, but I think that each of them (except maybe 5, which was a joke) alludes to something that a lot of libertarians need to accommodate in their views. If you can show why libertarianism doesn't need to be insensitive to each of the concerns expressed above, your understanding of libertarianism will be much better, plain and simple. That most libertarians I've talked to can't address these arguments except to dismiss them as being "wrong" is a shame and speaks badly about the quality of the ideas held by the average libertarian.
To be clear, I am a libertarian and think that libertarianism can be reconciled with the above criticisms. But the point is that the criticisms are good ones, and if our views require us to deny that these concerns are legitimate, then our views suck.
P.S. Jon, I checked out the end of Mack's essay, where he talks about initial appropriation, and could only conclude that he completely missed the point. He seemed to be rejecting Cohen's critique by saying that having an effective Proviso is pretty much unimportant, but Cohen's (and Nozick's!) point was that without such a Proviso, it's hard to see why we would think of private appropriation as inherently just. Mack doesn't seem to take account of the fact that people could reasonably say, "I don't think a private property system is just at all. It's not that you have the stuff or I have the stuff; it's that giving one of us exclusive rights to the stuff is often going to be unfair, and any system that is built on giving one of us such rights is unfair too." I think David Schmidtz has a good discussion of a better way around Cohen's argument in his essay, "The Institution of Property", which is available for free as a word document on Schmidtz' home page.
Yeah, Schmidtz deals with the whole "proviso" quite well.
Thanks for the input guys. I appreciate the time you spent on replying to my post.
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